CineGear Expo 2007

This is only the second year I've gone to the CineGear Expo, but already they've raised the price of parking from free to $7 and instituted a ridiculous photograph policy. Plus, I had to miss the RED screening of Peter Jackson's WWI short film because it was on Friday during work hours. And the line to get in Saturday morning was chaotic and long.

But enough of the bad. How about some of the good?

The good news is that indies are now dictating where the market is going. On the higher end, it seems like everyone is reacting to RED -- both Sony and Dalsa have 4k shooting systems that are pretty outstanding -- and it seemed like everyone and their mother was developing direct-to-disk recording solutions for all of these cameras that offer RAW data out.

The Battle of the On-Set Recording Units

The first one of these I saw was the S.two, the unit David Fincher used with Zodiac and now Benjamin Button. It's built to work seamlessly with a Final Cut Pro post-production workflow. Producers and insurance companies like the fact that the drive arrays slide out for transport to the transfer house in the form of d.mags or digital magazines. (Yes, that's right, they like the fact that it is just as risky as a mag full of film.) Ted White, the VP of North American Sales, said they have made configurations for films at $500,000 budgets all the way up to the $200M Button.

Next, I stopped by Codex, whose system had gotten a lot of buzz earlier in the morning coming out of the Dalsa Origin screening. The Codex recorder comes in two sizes, a large, rack-mounted unit and, unbelievably, a portable unit not much larger than a toaster. The drive-array 'mags' accepted by the large unit hold about one hour of uncomressed 4k. The portable unit's mags hold 45 minutes. Codex's conversion system is super flexible, allowing for ProRes, DVCPro, MXF or other format files to be created simulaneous with the hi-rez backups, so you can give the editor the files right away, with up to two channels of sync'd audio.

Continue reading about the CineGear Expo 2007...Although Dalsa's tent featured the Codex pretty extensively, they also have their own recording solution, the Flashmag (TM) "based on reliable, high speed, solid-state flash memory" which holds 20 minutes of RAW uncompressed 4k, 16-bit data.

Speaking of video recording devices, anther crowded booth was Easy Look System, which makes an all-in-one video assist hard disk recorder. Unfortunately, it was too crowded for me to talk to any representatives.

The Battle of the Super HD Cameras

I've already blogged RED to death. Since I couldn't make it to their screening, and since they didn't spring for a booth at the Expo this year, it was time to check out their more pricey competition.

I was worried I wouldn't make the Dalsa screening at 10am since the line to get into the expo was so chaotic. Fortunately, the event started late. Unfortunately, that meant that none of the excellent panelists got to say much after the screening of the short film "The Trident", written and directed by Anurag Mehta. It's an Indian martial arts flick with a fun, campy cameo by David Carradine. The D.P., David Stump, shot some beautiful closeups of Carradine's craggy face that had a depth of field of about half an inch.

Nearly all of the panelists addressed a James Cameron quote to the effect of "Why would a beautiful actress allow a 4k closeup of her face?" by saying that 4k detail would not make a beautiful actress appear less beautiful, and besides, one can always remove resolution after the fact, but not so easily add sharpness.

The movie looked good -- more pristine and more color-saturated than film. But the kicker was that they couldn't fit a 4k server into the ancient Wadsworth Theater's projection booth, so they ended up using an HD-CAM SR tape. It's hard hard to know how much better it would've looked from a data-based master.

It did, however, even the playing field for Band Pro, who demonstrated Sony's new F23 CineAlta camera with the same projection system, and with test footage also shot by David Stump. The F23 is pretty awesome, allowing for variable frame rates from 1-60fps, including super-smooth ramping. I have no idea how much it will cost to rent one compared to RED, but the low-light test footage was incredible. Firelight, 1600 ASA, almost zero noise. Unlike the Varicam, it uses true progressive frame recording for the variable speed shots -- no flagged frames.

Surprisingly, the F23 uses 3CCDs, just like your better consumer camera, not a single CMOS chip. But unlike a consumer camera, it has a B4 mount for film lenses [B4 on the F23 is a standard 2/3" video mount - not a PL style film mount - so it uses the same kinds of lenses you'd put on a Varicam, F900 Viper, etc. - Thanks to Mike from hdforindies for the correction.] Its recording unit is also detachable, or able to mount directly onto the camera in a couple of configurations. Said the Band Pro rep: "It's really exciting to see they're finally listening to the community."

Other Cool Stuff I Saw

The big story for us DV rebels this year is that the Panasonic HVX200 was absolutely everywhere. There were even several places making accessories that cost nearly as much as the camera itself, which I found humorous. Even at booths not advertising accessories that were HVX specific, it seemed to be the demo camera of choice. As far as rentals, Coffey Sound was advertising an HVX200 for as little as $270/day.

RedRock Micro's M2 35mm lens adapter has been getting a lot of attention, and I got do some focus pulling on an HVX200 rig they had set up. It's true, the narrow depth of field lenses are a big part of the film look, and really take the camera to the highest level.

As far as ways to move your beefed-up prosumer camera around, there were a couple of cool solutions. Indie-Dolly Systems offers a very elegantly-designed dolly-and-track kit that packs up small and sets up easy for $1600, which is cheap enough that it could make sense to buy. The track and dolly are also pretty flexible to configure, so you can make the track small in close quarters, or switch out a stool for a plate the camera op can stand on.

EZ FX had a jib kit for $1200, with optional extension of the boom arm for another $700. The design was simple and easy to control, allowing for a clever filmmaker to do a number of angles without even moving the tripod base. A larger kit that supports up to 50lbs was only $2500.

I also talked for a long time with a guy at Satchler, makers of fine fluid heads for tripods. They have a whole line that depends mightily on your camera weight, but I did get him to say that the FSB6 was a good option for most DV set-ups. It works with a 75mm bowl, but you could buy a larger-sized (100mm, 150mm bowl) tripod and then adapt down. Satchler also offers a Steadicam-like stabilization arm designed for HD rigs. They don't sell direct, so the booth rep recommended going to your local production equipment dealer.

The Sachtler display tripods were all carbon, and carbon seems to be the new aluminum. I checked out a couple of places offering carbon boom poles, K-Tek and Loon. I'm not an expert in the area, but it seems like indies can afford to skip the new ultra-light carbon poles and go with good old aluminum -- putting the extra cash back into good cables. The very friendly K-Tek rep said that realistically, any boom poll is going to need the cable inside of it changed after about a year of scrunching up and down.

Speaking of sound, once again Location Sound's booth was a highlight of the Expo. The guys there are so friendly and knowledgable that it's hard not to stand there all day and get a master class in audio equipment. They showed me a blue shotgun mic from a company I'd never heard of, the Schoeps CMIT-5U, and said it was a great bang for the buck. They also recommended Audio-Technica's AT4073a shotgun mic for movie dialogue recording. As far as wireless goes, the Lectrosonics 211's were recommended -- though most used multi-channel mics would do for a good indie package.

House of Power was showing off what seemed to me to be pretty much the ultimate battery. At $1,200 to own their smallest version, it's out of my price range. The guy at the booth tried to pitch me on opening up a battery rental franchise. I said it sounded great, provided I was bottomless pit of money.

Most of the vendors I talked to were doing something that a low-budget movie maker could use, but far too many Just Don't Get It when it comes to the dollars. The insurance industry is suspect number one. I talked to some very friendly and honest people at the Insurance West Corp. They explained that really only one insurer will insure short-term film shoots. You're better off forming a production company and insuring by the year, otherwise you're dealing with a de facto monopoly in short-term insurance. I say de facto, because, according to the guys at the booth, it's just that no other insurer wants to make short-term deals. This is not the place for a rant against the insurance industry, who in general seems to try its best not to pay legitimate claims, besides over-charging in the first place. All I'm saying is that there is a certain level of filmmaking where the insurance becomes necessary to get locations and rent equipment, but the insurance is too expensive in proportion to the rest of the budget for the film. So people must 'shoot bandit' or not shoot at all. Nobody is helped by this barrier.

In terms of the cost-to-benefit ratio, I doubt I'll return to the CineGear Expo next year. While I saw some cool things, there wasn't much to be had in person that went beyond what I could get from spending the same amount of time on the web reading articles and product spec sheets. There are too many vendors who set up booths at the Expo but are reluctant to talk about or demonstrate their products. The guys at Lowell seemed to find it an imposition that I wanted to know about their product line, and they weren't alone. Many companies wasted their money by setting up boring booths that few people visited and staffing them with unenthusiastic reps whose disdain for customers alienated the visitors that did swing by. In contrast, vendors that had new technologies with something to prove were friendly, approachable and full of good information.

Maybe that's inevitable. But if I was Fuji or Kodak, I'd be targeting the next generation of cinematographers and working to make my prices and post-production processes competitive with 2k and 4k HD. When the guy at Codex made a comment that it was hard for older people to understand the new workflows, I told him not to worry. My generation has no problem conceptualizing data-only masters. We're just waiting for the generations ahead of us with the money to die off so we can buy the technology that makes sense.

FURTHER READING:
Last year's CineGear Expo coverage
HDforIndies coverage